Suggestions Towards the Future Government of India

by Harriet Martineau

Excerpt

The Case Unprecedented — Before arriving at the separate conditions of the case of India, we can see how peculiar the whole case is. For the first time we have to decide on a method of governing a vast territory and population, without aid from precedent or analogy. Even if we made' no change at 'all in the apparatus of Government, it would be a new depar ture, because it would be a choice — a deliberate adoption of a scheme of rule: and to such a choice there is no parallel in our history — nor perhaps iii any other. Our great privilege as a nation is that our British institutions have grown up, naturally and inevitably, from our character and our circumstances together. No man or body of men ever invented, or even foresaw, our constitution, as' we are living under it now. Our colonies individually grew up in much the same way, with the difference that 'the colonists went out level, as it were, with the political and social state of things at home, and therefore easy to provide for as natural subjects of British law and authority. The only Option required in their case was how far to assimilate the arrangements of' the colony to those at home; how far to conclude that the'same sort of men could, in a different country, live in the same sort of way as at home: Neither in our own case in Europe, nor in that of any British settlement in Africa or America, have we ever had to make a constitution, or lay out a clear and complete scheme of political'life.